Parole for Mikhail Khodorkovsky turned down on appeal

On the second day of the hearing at the Chita Region Court into the defence appeal against the refusal to grant Khodorkovsky release on parole Prosecutor Kiriyenko took the stand.

She described the disputed decision of the Ingodinsky district court as lawful and well-founded. It aroused particular suspicion, she said, that Mikhail Khodorkovsky was intent on “proving his innocence and has never repented at a single judicial hearing of the crimes he committed.” (The law, it must be said, does not demand repentance or admission of guilt from a prisoner applying for parole. However, the Ingodinsky district court and, today, the appeal court deliberately overlooked this prosecution argument.)

Continuing to demand from Mikhail Khodorkovsky something that is above and beyond the law, Prosecutor Kiriyenko declared that a prisoner should not reform “passively, simply by meeting all the demands of the law and the penal colony’s internal regulations. One can only reform actively, by showing initiative and this Khodorkovsky has not done, as it confirmed by the lack of positive citations.”

“These have been two days of increasing absurdity,” commented attorney Vadim Klyuvgant after the second day of the hearings. “Shame on the prosecutor’s office for descending to blatant lies.”

Having heard Mme Kiriyenko the court withdrew to consider its decision. After 2.5 hours the judicial collegium ruled that the appeal by Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyers should be turned down. “The court ruling contains no answers to our arguments. There is the semblance of a response in the form of declarations, slogans and verbiage,” stressed Klyuvgant, “but the facts we presented and the circumstances we referred to, were left, in essence, outside the framework of the ruling.”

The defence says that the grounds on which the Chita Region Court based its decision today had been “mechanically transferred” from the ruling of the Ingodinsky district court (lack of enthusiasm to become a garment worker, lack of citations, and the reprimand for not keeping his hands behind his back). The last of these, incidentally, is no longer valid from a legal point of view: yesterday marked a year since the reprimand was issued and the defence drew the court’s attention to this. The court was not listening to the defence, however.

“Until there is a direct command that justice must be applied according to the law and not so as to crush an individual, such ‘decisions’ will continue,” complained Vadim Klyuvgant. “All the procedures, based on fine words and declarations about the independence of the courts, and about overcoming legal nihilism, will continue their own separate existence while the fate of specific individuals, and that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky will be decided as before.”

It seems most likely that the defence will continue to appeal against the refusal to grant Mikhail Khodorkovsky parole before the presidium of the Chita Region Court. Khodorkovsky’s lawyers will take that decision after consultation with their client. Vadim Klyuvgant thinks it is worth pursuing so that at least the things which happened during these two days in the Chita Region Court can be “called by their true names”.